What caught your eye this week? (National Curriculum, Quantum attacks, Square Kilometre Array)

David Manners, components editor

Shortages of engineers prompted the IET to suggest that some engineering content should be injected unto the National Curriculum.

Steve Bush, technology editor

Not long ago, the US National Institute of Standards and Technology announced winners for its competition seeking security algorithms for today’s technology, likely to resist tomorrow’s quantum computer-based attacks, and already companies are using them.

The first Electronics Weekly heard of was an electronic passport demonstrator from a consortium of Infineon, the German Federal Printing Office and Fraunhofer AISEC. This was quickly followed by actual products: quantum-secure key exchange and digital signature handling IP blocks for FPGAs and asics from Xiphera of Finland.

Seek ‘Kyber’ and ‘Dilithium’ to find out more about the NIST algorithms.

Alun Williams, Web editor

The impressive scale of the Square Kilometre Array radio telescope system, which got its next official launch this week, caught my eye. It’s director-general Philip Diamond travelled to the site where SKA-Low will be built, in Western Australia, and council chair Catherine Cesarsky went to the SKA-Mid site, in South Africa’s Northern Cape. Its aim is to survey the sky far better and faster than was possible before.

Offsite links

• Terran Orbital has highlighted its contribution to a demonstration of a record-breaking 1.4-terabytes of data delivered from space to ground by an optical downlink in a single pass. The demonstration connected the TeraByte InfraRed Delivery (TBIRD) laser communications payload aboard NASA’s Pathfinder Technology Demonstrator 3 Satellite (PTD-3) to the ground, transmitting 1.4 TB of test data in a single ground station pass lasting less than 5 minutes. TBIRD is a NASA Space Communications and Navigation payload developed by the MIT Lincoln Laboratory.
• UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) and the Satellite Applications Catapult have partnered to demonstrate how advanced remote handling and robotics technology developed for fusion energy research can be used to provide maintenance for in-orbit satellites. The technology has been developed and tested at UKAEA’s Remote Applications in Challenging Environments (RACE) robotics centre in Culham, Oxfordshire.
• Artificial intelligence for defence applications could be developed more quickly due to an innovative defence community-based approach to trial hosted by the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl).
• Greg Wyler’s megaconstellation startup E-Space said it plans to buy radio frequency module developer CommAgility in a $14.5 million deal, reports Space News.